Tag Archives: APA

The safety of our children is a sacred obligation we strive to preserve. Anything or anyone that harms them becomes the object of our distrust and potential wrath.

I want to raise the possibility that psychiatry, for all its accomplished champions like Thomas Insel of the NIMH, may have forgotten the elemental fear people feel for the safety of their children. If psychiatry becomes perceived as a consistently increasing threat to our children, then are its days as a monolithic social institution numbered?

This essay was prompted when I recently had a pronounced visceral reaction of repulsion as I read about dozens of young children being subjected to new MRI brain scan research. Many friends that I shared this research with had a similarly strong negative reaction. The NIMH-supported research article, “Disrupted Amygdala Reactivity in Depressed 4- to 6-Year-Old Children,” was reported in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. The two experimental groups were described as “… depressed 4- to 6-year-old children and their healthy peers.”

The pathologizing process of diagnosing and labeling a 4-year-old child as being a clinically depressed research subject and therefore unhealthy compared to their peers, is done with the assumption that making that medical diagnosis is in the best interest of the child.

It is harmful to assume something is wrong with a young child’s brain when there is no doubt ample evidence that something has happened or is happening in the child’s life, that is causing them distress, to say nothing about the negative effects of a child receiving a DSM identity-transforming diagnostic label and being officially categorized as an exceptionally young mental patient.
Plus, what does a doctor tell a 4-year-old child before the MRI machine starts? “Please hold very still now, because we need to find out if there is something wrong with your brain.”

The children in this research on depression were also described as being “medication-naive.” None of them had been on medications – yet. If the word “naive” was instead used to mean that the children were innocent, then that would be accurate because a 4-, 5-, or 6-year-old child is indeed innocent and is helplessly at the mercy of the adults who decide what happens to them.

For over 30 years, I’ve known and worked alongside many child psychiatrists. They are some of the most dedicated and caring people I have ever known. When I would repeatedly protest to them about the dangers of prescribing antipsychotic meds and SSRI’s to children and teens, the psychiatrists often, with true anguish would respond to me by saying, “But Michael, I have to do it! The latest brain imaging research says that psychosis damages the brain, and it has been shown that depression is caused by a lack of serotonin.”

The solid, peer-reviewed research I would then offer, attempting to counter their biochemical, genetic-based, disease model beliefs, would unfortunately not be taken seriously enough to change my psychiatrist coworkers’ minds.

To no avail, I would urge them to consider that valuable scientific inquiry in the broader field of psychology doesn’t have to be limited to only studying genetics and the physical human brain. They shunned the evidence proving the efficacy of psychosocial alternatives to psychiatric medications. They seemed compelled to elevate applied neuroscience as a reified paradigm of understanding and treating human psychological distress.

It should be no surprise that almost all psychiatrists continue to believe what they were taught in their medical training, and believe what is affirmed in every journal they read about the future of psychiatry being applied neuroscience, and that they believe what is repeated to them by every drug company rep who frequently visits them with medication samples.

The path seems to be clear ahead for even more research on preschool children’s brains, because NIMH Chief Thomas Insel has a clear vision that he is determined to make happen. When he says, “The future of psychiatry is clinical neuroscience based on a much deeper understanding of the brain,” Dr. Insel means that his five-year plan called the Human Connectome Project, that will build a baseline data base for brain structure and activity using MRI imaging is leaving the DSM era of psychiatry in the dust.

The DSM is an embarrassment for a world class research scientist like Insel. But what he envisions is much more ominous for children and everyone else.
Insel’s leadership at the NIMH has the very strong support of forced treatment advocate, Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, who says of Insel: “He is the best director we have ever had.”

Insel and newly-elected APA President Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman want to preside over a new era of psychiatry where it gains the stature of any other medical specialty based on hard science. Insel and Lieberman want a research-proven genetic and biological basis for psychiatry, to qualify it as a fully functioning and respected clinical neuroscience.

Dr. Lieberman has recently said in The Scientific American, that vocal critics of psychiatry are “Misinformed or misinforming self-interested ideologues and self-promoters who are spreading scientific anarchy.”

Dissidents such as may appear on Mad in America are dismissed as scientific anarchists by the head of the APA, while President Obama and Congress are hugely bankrolling the new NIMH research on the brain.

The dramatic future for psychiatry envisioned by Doctors Insel, Torrey and Lieberman as a golden age of applied neuroscience appears to be assured.
Is psychiatry, as such a powerful monolithic social institution, truly “too big to fail?” Or is there a hidden vulnerability present in the proud edifice?

I wrote a blog here on MIA a couple of years ago called “I Don’t Believe in Mental Illness, Do You?” What that means to me is that I don’t believe in the centuries-long medical model project of pathologizing human emotional suffering that is the hallmark of psychiatry.

The medical model never satisfied my answers about the causes and healings from my own experiences of emotional suffering and madness, or spoke to me as a reliable guide in helping the children and adults I provide therapy for. If I did believe in the medical model, I would surely do what my child psychiatrist friends unintentionally sometimes do – I would risk harming innocent children while truly believing that I am helping them.

What we believe can dictate what we do. But surely our beliefs should not result in children being harmed.

The problem is, that the medical model belief system sets psychiatrists up to be blind to its harmful applications. Psychiatrists who did lobotomies and sterilizations convinced themselves according to medical model tenets, that such harmful procedures were necessary and in the recipient’s best interest. The fact that child psychiatrists in Australia will actually administer ECT to children under 4 years old, and that antipsychotic and antidepressant medications are given to toddlers in the U.S., is dramatic continued proof of how the treatments dictated by a morally numb psychiatric science are still failing to pass the caregiver litmus test of “First, do no harm.”

Blindly failing that ethical test means that psychiatry is clearly in the process of losing the moral authority to deserve our trust, especially as we learn more of how our children are at risk of being harmed.

So, I have come to believe in recent years that Dr. Insel’s vision and the incredible psychiatric social experiment of pathologizing human emotional suffering will ultimately fail, because psychiatry will continue to zealously and blindly cross a morally repulsive line and forget that a great many people will never accept their children and grandchildren being exposed to danger.
I believe that at some point, those continued treatment excesses with our children will finally cause the general public to lose faith in and simply abandon psychiatry, moving on to a new paradigm of care where the growing demands for safe and nonpathologizing alternatives are met.

The obsolescence of psychiatry may not happen in my lifetime, but you will see the tide turn even more in that direction when a first young blogger appears on Mad in America to proclaim, “I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and put on antipsychotic medications when I was very young. Please understand, I was only four years old when they started injuring me.”

In this amazing, over-the-top rant by Dr. Jeffrey A. Lieberman, the new president of the American Psychiatric Association, he contemptuously denounces activists who openly challenge psychiatry as being “misguided and misleading ideologues and self-promoters who are spreading scientific anarchy.”

I believe his aggressive rant proves we are making progress, in raising public awareness about the human rights abuses done by psychiatry.

As an Occupy APA protest speaker outside the APA convention tomorrow, I’m going to add two sentences to my speech:

“Mr. President, your legacy of good works has just been tarnished here today by your cheerleading for a group of physicians who blindly inflict human rights abuses on those they have sworn to serve. In supporting the American Psychiatric Association as their keynote speaker here today, you have turned a blind eye to the suffering that psychiatry creates, and have proven that although you may be the most masterful politician of your generation, you have failed miserably to be on the right side of history.”

American Psychiatric Association Protest
May 19, 2013 — San Francisco
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 13, 2013

On May 19th, MindFreedom International, the Law Project for Psychiatric Rights (PsychRights®), and the California Client Action Workgroup, organized under the Occupy Psychiatry banner, will protest of the American Psychiatric Association’s 2013 Annual Conference at the Moscone Center, 747 Howard St, San Francisco, California, from 11:30 am until 5:30 pm.

The American Psychiatric Association is being charged with serious human rights abuses, coercing people to undergo brain-damaging psychiatric drugs and electroshock, psychiatric profiling, scientific fraud, and psychiatric labeling, including the already discredited Fifth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) to be released at the conference.

Psychiatric survivor, psychotherapist and MindFreedom Board Member Matthew Morrissey will speak and MC the protest rally and demonstration which will feature the following speakers:

§ Leonard Roy Frank, psychiatric survivor and editor.” As psychiatrist Thomas Szasz wrote in 2008, ‘Modern psychiatry — with its Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals of nonexisting diseases and their coercive cures — is a monument to quackery on a scale undreamed of in the annals of medicine.’ Now is the time for the people to hold the American Psychiatric Association and its members accountable for their crimes against humanity.”

§ Ted Chabasinski, psychiatric survivor and lawyer, who was electroshocked for experimental purposes when he was six years old. “The increased labeling and drugging of children, and the way the new DSM puts everyone at risk for being called ‘mentally ill’ must be stopped. Everyone must realize that they too can be called crazy, not just those who have already been dragged into and trapped by the system.”

§ Chaya Grossberg, psychiatric survivor and healer. “Rather than being a source for healing, the American Psychiatric Association has damaged the souls and bodies of millions of Americans.”

§ Michael Cornwall, PhD, licensed therapist and human rights activist. “The profession of psychiatry lives in a collective state of denial. Psychiatrists are true believers with a religious fundamentalist type of fervor that allows them to routinely injure, and frequently hasten the death of those they are sworn to heal. But the reckoning is upon them. Their blatant human rights violations will not stand the light of day.”

§ James B. (Jim) Gottstein, Esq., psychiatric survivor and lawyer. “Hundreds of thousands of people are locked up and drugged or electroshocked against their will every day under the auspices of the American Psychiatric Association. These are human rights abuses on a massive scale in violation of United States and International Law. The American Psychiatric Association must be held accountable for its role in these horrors.”

There will also be an open microphone for protestors who want to speak. At least portions of the protest will be live-streamed at ustream.tv on the Occupy Psychiatry Channel,http://bit.ly/10kf0cS.

On Friday, May 17th, from 7 to 10 pm, along with protest preparations, there will be a free/donation based screening of Daniel Mackler’s new film, Coming off Psych Drugs: A Meeting of the Minds, at the beautiful Goforaloop Gallery, 1458 San Bruno Ave., San Francisco.
# # #

The Law Project for Psychiatric Rights is a public interest law firm devoted to the defense of people facing the horrors of forced psychiatric drugging and electroshock. We are further dedicated to exposing the truth about these drugs and the courts being misled into ordering people to be drugged and subjected to other brain and body damaging interventions against their will. Currently, due to massive growth in psychiatric drugging of children and youth and the current targeting of them for even more psychiatric drugging, PsychRights has made attacking this problem a priority. Children are virtually always forced to take these drugs because it is the adults in their lives who are making the decision. This is an unfolding national tragedy of immense proportions. Extensive information about all of this is available on our web site, http://psychrights.org/. Please donate generously. Our work is fueled with your IRS 501(c) tax deductible donations. Thank you for your ongoing help and support.